Current Edition
The Self and the World : Dialogues on Art and Friendship
Dear Stuti, I can’t say exactly when it was that we became friends, but I think it has something to do with the months we lived in the same room, not speaking a word to each other, and then that one evening we decided to break the silence. It remains something of a...
Before They Came to Humans : 3 Poems after Artworks by Rashmimala
Instructions to study a leaf Select healthy, mature leaves. Collect them in a dry, plastic bag.Look around from where your feettouch the ground. Do not move themfrom their chosen graves. Observe the sample for its morphological features.Bend down and say hello. Be...
Available Light : 3 poems after Artworks by Manisha Gera Baswani
Origin Story And so, Brahma, the spider, spins again a silver web. His body is all night. Stars pin themselves around his eight ankles across all eight directions as we spill from his spinneret like spiderlings waking into life. And Mother to us all, he...
‘City of Shard and Smoke’ : 3 Poems After Artworks by Soghra Khurasani
ChatGPT has an Idea for a Poem In conclusion, it was not want. I have a hundred and fifty two thousand approximations of want. This isn’t that. No zap of lightning over my proverbial head. No hunger in the cavity of my drives. No flush of feelings in my...
‘Babel of Broken Pencil Points’ : 3 Poems after Artworks by Shilpa Gupta
Untitled Between the scratching pencil and the interface, a red palm bloomsinto a fist of petals i bite its green stem and the white sap turnspaisley with want i hold it close this fiery missive from the tombsthese fingers long as...
“A Women is As Women Does” & “A Rising Tide”: Nancy Adajania’s “Curatorial Diptych” of Women Artists from the 20th and 21st Centuries
An art show can be many different things. The white cube offers a blank canvas for curatorial intervention, a hospitable surface for different discursive threads to coalesce into an intelligible pattern. It can reveal unseen connections, pose difficult questions, or...
The Language of Lines: Breaking Out the Body
A story always starts before it can be told. ~ Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life How else to arrive at the ecstasy of ourselves if we cannot see another’s body? ~ Tishani Doshi, Pilgrimage Beauty, as an eternal idea, is best embodied in art, Susan...
At the Crossroads : Contemporary Artistic Practices in Ladakh
On a road trip to Ladakh last year, I learnt about “suture zones” during a conversation over dinner with a mutual friend, a research scholar studying geophysics. In geology, a “suture zone” is a place where two tectonic terrains meet, i.e. an area where chunks of...
Organic Monumentality: Latika Katt and the Ecologies of Form
In the histories of post-Independence Indian sculpture, the dominant narratives of modernism have often privileged monumentality, nationalism, and masculine sculptural authority. Yet such frameworks have left comparatively little room for practices that pursued...
Memory, Loss and the Ageing Body: The Art of Anoli Parera
When I came back from US I knew nobody in Sri Lanka. I first started painting seriously while we were there and I also had my first solo exhibition while Sasanka and I were in Santa Barbara.[^1] I started going to exhibitions at the newly opened Heritage Gallery in...
Teeming with life : Sayan Chanda’s Mythic Tapestries
Last night, we slept in the forest. A light body landed on the roof and we dreamt it was a leopard. A collective dream built from fear and fascination that held us on a threshold. What is it that we expected in the forest? A being larger than our understanding? What...
Poetics of the Ordinary: Art Practice and Aesthetic Grammar in the Art of Nandini Bagla Chirimar
The art practice of Nandini Bagla Chirimar in the series titled It’s the Little Things… and My Mother’s Closet, encompasses her engagement with everyday objects, domestic spaces and material processes. This essay is an attempt to explore how her artwork employs a...
Fleshed Out: Mandeep Raikhy’s A Male Ant Has Straight Antennae & early works.
Over the recent past, most contemporary dance work in India suffers from the affliction of politics always trumping physical language. Choreographers are entirely preoccupied with perfecting a standpoint rather than labouring at articulating a devised phrase of...
Kind of Blue: Lapis Lazuli and the Crafts of Transformation
Layers of cement once obscured the 16th century painted ceiling of the Sabz Burj in Nizamuddin in Delhi. Restoration work done by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (in partnership with the Archaeological Survey of India and with the support of Havells India Limited)...
The Art of Sunil Gupta and Chitra Ganesh : Re-writing the Hegemonic Narrative
This personal essay takes a long view of the artwork of Sunil Gupta and Chitra Ganesh, two diaspora artists whose articulations of queer existence foreground a compelling range of aesthetic and socio-political concerns. I reflect on their practice, curating some of my...














